This invention relates generally to recording technology, with particular application to heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), and to associated articles, systems, and methods. A HAMR device may be used in a hard disk drive that includes a magnetic recording medium adapted to overcome superparamagnetic effects that might otherwise limit the areal data density of other types of magnetic media. In order to record information in this medium, the HAMR device may locally heat a small portion of the recording medium which is also exposed to a magnetic write field of a selected polarity generated by a magnetic write head. The local heating provided by the HAMR device allows the small portion of the recording medium to take on a magnetization that is the same polarity as the magnetic write field, while neighboring portions of the recording medium adjacent to the small portion may have respective magnetizations that are not changed even though the magnetic write field extends to those neighboring portions. As a technique for locally heating the small portion of the recording medium, others have proposed different combinations of a laser light source and a component known alternatively as a plasmonic antenna, a plasmonic transducer, or a near field transducer. Such component is referred to herein as a near field transducer, which is abbreviated herein as “NFT”. The NFT converts some of the power from the laser light into a hot spot whose transverse dimensions are smaller than the diffraction-limited spot size for the laser light, provided the magnetic recording medium is located close enough to the NFT.